Sunday, 11 January 2015

During the Christmas vacation I read the fantastic book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. It contains a number of really interesting ideas about colour schemes, so I was curious how these relate to existing games. I was especially curious about Proun: when creating the art for this game I did not know anything practical about colour theory. I just tweaked the colours until they looked good. Apparently this was successful, since reviewers were extremely positive about Proun's visuals and vibrant colours. How then do the colour schemes in Proun relate to Gurney's colour theories? To analyse this I have developed a simple little tool that visualises the colour scheme in an image. You can download the tool and source further in this post. So let's have look: what are Gurney's ideas and how do they relate to Proun's art?

The concept I found most interesting in Gurney's book is gamut mapping. To understand this we first need to know the colour wheel. This shows all the colours in a circle. Towards the inside the colours desaturate towards grey. This means that the strongest colours are at the outside. The colour circle is independent of light/dark: each of those colours can still be made lighter or darker.

The idea is that you pick a few colours and only use the colours that can be mixed using those colours. This limits the number of colours that can be used in an artwork. Usually one would pick three colours. This creates a triangle on the colour wheel and we can only use the colours inside the triangle. The area of allowed colours is called the "gamut mask".

The big revelation to me is that this means that only the three chosen primary colours can be fully saturated. All other colours will be less saturated since they cannot be on the outer rim of the colour wheel, no matter how bright the chosen primary colours are. This limits the colour usage and keeps an artwork from becoming a "fruit salad" as Gurney calls it.

The colour gamut can even be on just one side of the colour wheel, greatly limiting the colour scheme in an artwork. While normally an artist would need to be careful not to use colours too much, when using a limiting gamut it becomes possible to aim for using the brightest colours allowed within the gamut and still achieve a harmonious whole.

I suppose experienced artists might have many other tricks to achieve good colour schemes, and there is probably some really good art that totally doesn't fit what Gurney explains. Nevertheless the colour gamuts seem like a very sensible and useful tool to me. This made me curious: how do the colour schemes in Proun relate to them?

To be able to exactly analyse the colour schemes of existing art I have hacked together a little C# tool: Joost's Colour Wheel Visualiser. It simply loads an image (JPG or PNG) and shows which parts of the colour wheel are used in that image. You can download the tool (including source code) here:

Now that we have this tool, what do Proun's colour schemes look like? Let's have a look.

Surprisingly, it turns out that most of these form quite clear triangles. Apparently while searching for colours that look good together I accidentally used Gurney's theories quite exactly! I happen to even vary between the schemes he gives as examples: some gamuts are mostly on one side of the colour wheel, while others are quite exact complementary schemes.

One thing I was never really satisfied with in Proun is the colours of the opponents. Those are only seen all together at the very beginning of a race and I always felt like they didn't look good together. When analysing those colours using my Colour Wheel Visualiser it quickly becomes clear why. As you can see in the image below their colours are random splotches on the colour wheel, unrelated to the other colours in the image.

I think I might have been able to fix this problem by using different colours for the opponents depending on the track, so that I would have been able to match their colours to each track's colour scheme. Next time, Gadget!

I also tried my tool on screenshots from Awesomenauts, which was designed by the Ronimo art team. In the images below you can see that the colour scheme is all over the place. It really is an explosion of colour, as is fitting for the over-the-top eighties themes of Awesomenauts. Nevertheless you can see that even in the top image the colour scheme ignores large parts of the colour wheel, so even there the colour usage is limited. I think our artists did a great job on the art for Awesomenauts, so this is a good example of how not all good art needs to keep to Gurney's colour gamuts.

Here are the colour schemes for a number of other games:

By the way, note how in all the screenshots analysed in this blogpost Proun is the only game that uses the purple/pink/magenta area. This might be accidental, but it seems like this part of the colour wheel is used quite rarely in games.

I am going to try to use Gurney's ideas in the art for Cello Fortress. One particular challenge I see there is that the player's tanks should be immediately recognisable. I currently make the tanks stand out by using extremely bright colours for the tanks, but this will be difficult when using a limiting gamut according to Gurney's rules. I am quite curious how that ends up. If anyone has any tips on how to tackle this, then please let me know in the comments!

Sunday, 4 January 2015

In the past 7.5 years I have supervised over a dozen programming interns at Ronimo and have seen hundreds of portfolios of students and graduates. In almost all of those I saw the same things that they needed to learn. One might expect that I think they need to learn specific techniques, algorithms or math, or other forms of specific knowledge. And of course they do, but in my opinion that is never the main thing. The main thing they need to learn is self discipline. The discipline to always write the clearest code you can, the discipline to refactor code if it becomes muddy through changes later in development, the discipline to remove unused code and add comments.

Most of the time I spend supervising programming interns is spent on these topics. Not on explaining advanced technologies or the details of our engine, but on making them write better code in general. I always ask applicants what they think is important in being a good programmer and they usually answer that code should be clear, understandable and maintainable. That is indeed what I want to hear, but it is very rare for a young programmer to actually consistently follow through with that.

Keeping this in mind requires self discipline, because it means not stopping "when it works". If all the variables would have the wrong name the code could still function perfectly, but the code would be super confusing. The step from functional code to clear code brings very little reward in the short term: it worked already and after cleaning it up it still works. That is why discipline is required to take this step. That is also why doing an internship is so useful: a good supervisor is vigilant on code quality (even though the definition of "good code" might of course differ per programmer) and thus forces the intern or junior to always take that next step.

Let me give a few examples of the kinds of things I often see in code written by starting programmers:

Liar functions/variables/classes

These are functions, classes or variables that do something else than their name suggests. Their name is a lie. It is very obvious that names should be correct, but to my surprise it is quite common for names to be completely off.

An example I recently encountered in code written by a former intern was two classes: EditorGUI and EditorObjectCreatorGUI. This is code that handles the interface in our editors. To my surprise it turned out that the code that handled the button for creating new objects was in EditorGUI, while EditorObjectCreatorGUI only handled navigating through different objects. The exact opposite of what the naming suggests! Even though the code was relatively simple, it took me quite a while to understand it, simply because I started with a completely wrong assumption based on the class names. The solution in this case is really simple: rename EditorObjectCreatorGUI to EditorObjectNavigationGUI and it is already much, much more understandable.

This is something I see a lot: names that are simply incorrect. I think this often happens because code evolves while working on it. When the name was chosen it might have been correct, but by the time the code was finished it had become wrong. The trick is to constantly keep naming in mind. You have to always wonder whether what you are adding still fits the name of the function or class.

Muddy classes

Another problem I see is muddy classes: classes that do a lot of unrelated things. Again this is something that happens as you keep working on the same code. New features are added in the easiest spots and at some point classes become bloated with all kinds of unrelated behaviour. Sometimes the bloating is not even in the size of the classes: a class might be only a few hundred lines but still contain code that does not belong there.

An example of how this can happen is if for some reason a GUI class needs to analyse what textures are available (maybe because there is a button to select a texture). If the GUI class is the only class that needs the results of this analysis, then it makes sense to do that in the GUI class. However, then some totally unrelated gameplay class for some reason also needs that info. So you pass the GUI class to that gameplay class to query the texture information. At this point the GUI class has grown to be something more: it is also the TextureAnalyser class. The solution is simple: split off the TextureAnalyser class into a separate class that can be used by both the GUI class and the gameplay class.

The general rule of thumb to avoid this problem is to always wonder: does the functionality that I am adding here still fit the name of the class? If not, then the class either needs to be renamed, or it needs to be split into separate classes or the code needs to go into a different class.

It is usually a Bad Smell if you cannot come up with a fitting name for your class. If you cannot describe what a class does in its name, then maybe what it does is too muddy. It might need to be split into parts that make more sense and can actually be described with a proper name.

Oversized classes

This one is really similar to the muddy classes above: over time more and more is added to a class and it gets bloated. In this case however it all still makes sense to be in one class, but the class simply grows too big. Gigantic classes are cumbersome to work with. Bugs slip in easily as there is a lot of code manipulating the same private member variables, so there are a lot of details one can easily overlook.

Splitting a class that has grown too big is quite boring work. It can also be a challenge if the code in the class is highly intertwined. Add to this that it already works and that fixing it adds no new functionality. The result is again that it requires serious self discipline to split a class whenever it becomes too big.

As a general rule of thumb at Ronimo we try to keep classes below 500 lines and functions below 50 lines. Sometimes this is just not feasible or sensible, but in general whenever a class or function grows beyond that we look for ways to refactor and split it into smaller, more manageable pieces. (This makes me curious: where do you draw the line? Let me know in the comments!)

Code in comments

Almost all sample code that applicants send us contains pieces of code that have been commented out, without any information on why. Is this broken code that needs to be fixed? Old code that has been replaced? Why is that code there? When asked applicants are usually well aware that commented-out-code is confusing, but somehow they almost always have it in their code.

Parallel logic and code duplication

Another problem that I often see occurring is to have similar logic in several spots.

For example, maybe the name of a texture gives some information as to what it is intended for, like “TreeBackground.dds”. To know whether a texture can be used for a tree we check the filename to see whether it starts with the word “Tree”. Maybe with the SDK being used we can check that really quickly by just using filename.beginsWith(”Tree”). This code is so short that if we need it in various spots, we can just paste it there. Of course this is code duplication and everyone knows that code duplication should be avoided, but if the code being duplicated is so short, then it is tempting to just copy it instead. The problem we face here is obvious: maybe later the way we check whether a texture is fit for a tree changes. We then need to apply shotgun surgery and fix each spot separately.

A general rule of thumb here is that if code is very specific, then it should not be copied but put in a function. Even if it is super short and calling a function requires more code than doing it directly.

All of the things discussed in this blogpost are really obvious. Most of these things are even taught in first year at university. The challenge is to make the step from knowing them to actually spending the time to always follow through with them, to always keep them in mind. This is why the most important thing that all programming interns learn at Ronimo is not knowledge, but self discipline.